I’d like to feel sorry for folks affected by the Ashley Madison hack. Oh hell, that’s a lie; I wouldn’t like to and I don’t. I've spent the past three days in a municipal hoosegow waiting for my ex to wire over bail money, all while being psychologically tortured by a deputy who looks like a "Deliverance" extra and thinks Donald Trump belongs on Mount Rushmore. You Ashley Madison marks can feel sorry for me.

After all, it’s not as though the world (including yours truly) didn’t blare a loud warning when Adult Friend Finder got hacked a few weeks prior. Not only did you guys fail to heed those warnings, you managed to gloss over the fact that you’ve permanently meta-tagged yourselves as lying spousal boogerballs on an Internet with a privacy record so porous you might as well have posted your philander-ads and giblets pics on a billboard overlooking I-95.

It’s the age-old adage: Science giveth and the rubes taketh away. Because of this universal truth, I’m stuck in jail again, this time somewhere in the general area of Oregon.

It started a couple of weeks ago with my semi-annual doctor’s visit. Since moving to the great Northeast, I’ve had to switch doctors, which is never good, but especially so in this case because my primary physician in Gotham had more in common with Doc Holliday than Marcus Welby. My physicals used to take place at McGinty’s Bar and Grill. Now, I had to go to his office, give blood, cough, look left, the whole ride. What did I get for my efforts?

He now has me eating food with the same spice palette as a shoebox, swallowing various anti-cholesterol drugs, and -- worst of all -- rationing my scotch intake. I think he said “cut out entirely,” but all I could hear was “rationing.” They’re basically synonyms.

We’re deep in the dog days of summer here in New York. Braving the outside means risking permanent fusion with your Jockeys or psychological scarring inflicted by seeing a baby fight a cat for a half-eaten snow cone. Days like this make anyone cranky and lazy, but when you’re already a professional-grade snark, the oppressive heat devolves your psyche to that of a Cro-Magnon, alleviated occasionally by short bursts of lucidity.

Thus, I’m taking a scattergun approach this week -- there’s too much idiocy in the tech world for someone with my heat-limited focus to choose only one target. At least, that's my excuse.

Gun-shaped iPhone cases

Whoever invented this cement-headed, slack-jawed, drooling, and primal moron bait, I want you to go to a large urban police station, stand in the middle of the SWAT squad room, shout “Look at me, coppers!” and whip out your iPhone. After that, see if you can find an app that’ll measure the rapid rise in your body’s lead content against the even more rapid decline in sympathy from anyone with functioning prefrontal lobes.

Here it is, Thursday, and we've had an epically entertaining week. In one corner, another yahoo has declared a 2016 presidential bid, which brings the total number of either fully committed or actively exploring candidates to 28. Forget debates; they’ll have to settle their primaries in the octagon, and I hope someone pulls the Donald’s hair so we can finally know for sure what that stuff really is.

In a separate corner, we have yet one more epic fail from a PC maker screwing over its customers.

A while back, it was Lenovo and its Superfish adware fiasco. As you may recall, execs at the company thought it’d be good marketing strategy to open up its products to even more digital mayhem, charge for the privilege, and once caught, spend the first few days claiming there wasn’t really any danger while also spraying flame-retardant foam on their pants.

This journalism racket is tough, so I had to act fast a couple of days ago when I heard that Elop was on the outs. But before I could publish anything, I first had to get my hands on hard evidence. Hey, I’m a professional (technically).

I managed to inveigle a free economy seat to Elop’s locale by booking myself as Spy Drone Operator 7 of 9 on a semisecret FBI surveillance flight. Locating Elop’s house required flashing the local mail carrier a blowtorch, and when I got there, I was welcomed by a 6-foot chain link fence adorned with a picture of an angry-looking doggie. Look, if I paid attention to signs with little pictures on them I’d never find a decent parking space, and once over the fence (risking my chance at offspring in the process), I quickly found his garbage cans and started the time-tested reporter’s dumpster dance.

Some weeks see little or no advancement in the human condition. During these times, scanning the media for headlines promising a brighter tomorrow yields only election hyperbole, debatable research findings, and social outrage. Then weeks like this restore my optimism for humanity’s future, bring wonder to children’s eyes, and would make DaVinci dance in the streets if only he weren’t so very dead.

What has me crowing this week? SteamVR’s room-scale virtual reality experience? Pshaw! The new AWS cloud compute instance? Please! No, this week saw the resurgence of a tech sector long at the forefront of this country’s greatest advancements, but fell quiet in recent years, so much so that most of us Really Advanced Analysts thought it would never return to technology’s bleeding edge. How wrong we were.

Back in the mid-2000s I was invited to the campus of a tech giant in the Pacific Northwest that shall, for the sake of the InfoWorld legal team, remain nameless. There was far too much blathering and far too little free scotch for my taste, but the event that sticks out most in my memory happened when I was escorted to dinner by a pair of nervous, presumably armed PR flaks.

Upon entering the restaurant, I saw no fewer than three tables populated by groups of four to six diners, each of whom was staring at their respective smartphones. A diner might begin speaking to his/her/its dinner companions, and all of them would nod in agreement, though never taking their eyes from their phones.

What's the name of today's up-and-coming generation? Whatever it is, we might think about changing it to the Overts or the Ultra-Gregarians or Generation Flasher. While our peers wring their hands at the infosec and personal privacy situation we’ve forced these kids to inherit, the youngsters went ahead and did what children do: Ignore the problem and pick up where they left off in GTA. However, their infosec apathy doesn't give me the creeps; I'm much more alarmed that a big chunk of my generation has set the example.

As my most detail-conscious readers are aware, I occasionally comment on my rapidly, blindingly, rocket-propelled advancing age. For the most part, it grants me a unique combination of omniscience and near-sociopathic levels of disregard for facts. But it can be a weakness, usually when my time-tested snarkiness causes me to pan a new gadget/invention/fluffdongle that's excited much of the rest of the (younger) world. That’s how it is with the Apple Watch.

I believe I’ve been fairly clear that I regard Apple’s digi-watch as a global socioeconomic failure on a par with TNT canceling "Franklin & Bash" (or introducing "Franklin & Bash," I forget). But what if I was talking like an old fart because my pickled brain couldn’t comprehend the brilliance and beauty that’s obvious to people who haven't yet had to consider shaving their ears? The question bothered me -- until yesterday when Apple announced that Jony Ive had been promoted from Senior VP, Design and Annoying Hipster Names to Chief Design Officer.

A common pattern of ambition affects many occupations. For example, most lawyers eventually want to be politicians, and most cops eventually want to become full-time doughnut pushers.

For us journalists, we want to become novelists, which is as close as we’ll ever get to being rock stars … or assistants to rock stars or maybe bellhops who hold open doors for assistants to rock stars. It’s why we hate novelists and loudly decry their worth to humanity -- until the day we ourselves become novelists. Then novelists will, of course, exemplify all that is good in the world, while journalists will remain a bunch of touch-typing yahoos who couldn’t hack it.

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Technology IndustrySecurityHackingUpgrade or die: The second life of useless appsFri, 15 May 2015 03:00:00 -0700Robert X. CringelyRobert X. Cringely

I’ve reached an age where medical care of any kind becomes an adventure. In younger years, doctors were primarily engines of routine function: Go in for a checkup, get told you’re healthy as a horse, and go back to doing all the things you’ll regret about 20 years down the line -- barring your average youthful indiscretions like broken bones or bleeding head wounds.

But past a certain age, the medical profession exerts more influence over your life, probably because you’ve become more fragile … or more solvent. Now when you go to the doctor, odds are you'll lose a large mole or an extremity you didn't know existed. Dentists too become interior decorators, taking overpriced pictures of your mouth, clucking in disapproval, then ripping out everything they can get a clamp on and replacing it with highly expensive and hopefully more functional replicas. Guess what? The technology industry often works the same way.

Once again, the seasons are changing on the East Coast, which means I'm due for my annual possession by Beelzebub’s Death Flu. I’m sick, ill, and green, as well as violently expunging multicolored bodily fluids like clockwork.

Like most post-adolescent men who believe themselves on their deathbeds, I miss the Days of Mom, but instead, I lie here alone with a merciless cat that thinks nothing of meowing directly in my ear until I crawl out of bed to satisfy his endless food needs. Otherwise, I lie under covers and slowly suck in mystery liquids until my scotch-crippled antibodies drive out the demon germs. It's a fine strategy for me, he said, laboriously tying this anecdote to a point, but it’s not enough for the FTC.

I made two wishes today: for Gov. Gregg Abbott’s cellphone number and a Windows 10 phone. That way, when he panders to the lunatic fringe about the Pentagon possibly attacking Texas, I won’t have to sit home gnashing my teeth in frustration. Instead, I could send him the new Microsoft middle finger emoji.

But those very wishes disappoint me in a whole other, much more personal way. Wishing for an emoji and a phone number instead of only the phone number and a clear connection means I’ve finally and fully devolved into modern text culture -- and that sucks.

Win some, lose some. I like to poke fun at our institutes of higher learning, especially when they spend grant money on real-world research like zombie safe zones. I suppose that’s funny if it’s not April 15.

But then I overheard an undergrad from a New York City university that shall remain nameless attempt to explain to his study partner that Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft-Geselleschaft dichotomy referred to two large German mine shafts that split apart from a single tunnel. That spawned actual pain right behind my cornea, as did the fact the study groups seem to have moved from libraries and coffee shops to bars. At least I can now immediately quiet my frustration with a third shot of scotch.

A long, long, long time ago, a well-meaning wingnut told a collegiate me that I’d make a good lawyer. In response, I keyed his car. I can barely take the law as a journalist, let alone an active participant. Writing law is at best a vague and chaotic process. Interpreting that law is an exercise in highly paid professional obfuscation that makes angels cry.

A movie director might take that last sentence and interpret it as a smarmy defense attorney in a shiny suit getting a multiple kitten-kicker acquitted, on the grounds that the client’s activities technically corresponded to the Congressional interpretation of medical research set forth in Buttons v. Mengele. But in real life, legal nebulosity runs on both sides, not only the defense.

I like what I call popcorn columns: topics that explode out of the popper that is the daily Internet of trending tech headlines. These featherweight puffs land on my page for ridicule before they're dissolved, digested, and forgotten. But sometimes, what you think is a quickly masticated kernel becomes difficult to chew and impossible to ignore or forget. This time, the popcorn was Chris Hansen.

In case you’ve forgotten, Chris is the ex-"Dateline NBC" journalist who pioneered the show "To Catch a Predator," where paid, adult consultants who could pass for 13-year-olds would interact with potential pedophiles in Internet chat rooms, invite them to a temporarily parent-free house for underage sex, and finally, briefly greet them when they showed up before ducking out, replaced by Hansen and a camera crew. It was not a good day for those guys.

I turned 21 in a medium-sized Massachusetts town (not that one) that shall remain nameless. Though I may have tasted the sweet nectar of alcohol prior to the legal line in the sand, it in no way lessened my enthusiasm for the day.

For the audacious occasion, I imbibed a local vintage called State Vodka. In our one and only encounter, we established a level of intimacy I’ve rarely found in other parts of my life. Our evening together began early, accompanied by friends and food, but as our relationship deepened, it turned dark and solitary. The search party found me at a construction site the following morning, bloodied, bruised, and surrounded by pocket of booze and bodily fluids.

I’m lying in a figurative abyss, covered in metaphorical smoking ash, gurgling down very real scotch because Pammy dropped a bomb on me. Last week, she decided we should resume our storm-tossed romance, but today she let me know why: She wants to have kids. Now I’m smoldering in my imaginary bomb crater wracked with fears, questions, and doubts.

Is it wrong to have kids on the far side of 40? On the minus side, there’s the sleep factor. On the plus side, the more you've seen other fools screwing up their children, the less likely you are to mess up your own … unless of course your post-50-year-old heart gives out and you're on the business end of a funeral before your kid hits puberty.

April Fools' Day may be over, but the fallout continues. For me, it always comes back to the central mystery: Was it or was it not actually a joke? For 2015, the most confusing candidate came from the White House. I realize politicians -- especially staffers -- are second only to Catholic school nuns in their historic lack of a humor gene, but if you read the original post on the White House blog and its two subposts, then consider they were published on April 1 -- well, the humor door swings wide open.

If you were busy giggling about Tesla’s W model or Google’s Pac-Man and weren’t, like me, snogging scotch on the couch while surfing political websites, you may have missed what I’m talking about. It was a post by Michael Daniel, the Special Assistant to the President and the Cybersecurity Coordinator, titled “Our Latest Tool to Combat Cyber Attacks: What You Need to Know.” That sounded awesome, especially well into my second fifth, so of course I clicked on it.

I hate April Fools' Day, and not because it’s two weeks before Federally Mandated Pickpocket Day. It’s the one day people expect me to be more "Cringely" than ever, which somehow only refers to additional work and never extra scotch. It’s also the one day that all the serious journalists (suckers!) try to be “Cringesque,” which means I have loads of competition in the crazy pundit department.

You’ve undoubtedly already seen some of that competition: Microsoft’s new Linux distro; Google’s Pac-Man, and some weirdness about a Samsung Galaxy kitchen smartknife. There’s undoubtedly hundreds more viraling around the InterWebs, and many of their creators will be forced to issue tear-stained apologies tomorrow because several hundred thousand Web readers took them seriously and reformatted their hard disks in anticipation of Miux (I would have gone with Minx, personally) or cried hysterically because Pac-Man was too terrifying or threw out their Ginsu blades because only a smartknife could now satisfy their parsley-chopping needs.

It’s definitely getting worse. I’m referring, of course, to the ongoing trend of overvalued multi-freak-zillion-dollar tech firms expanding their businesses into markets completely unrelated to their original venture. What else?

We used to see this in only a few companies, mainly Google, where legend has it Sergey and Larry spent 2002 to 2010 strolling into work Monday mornings and rolling polyhedral dice to decide which random business they’d buy or sell that week: sometimes a digital ad engine, sometimes an organic lingerie factory, often a robot company.

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Technology IndustryThe tech cycle: Out with the old problems, in with the newWed, 25 Mar 2015 03:00:00 -0700Robert X. CringelyRobert X. Cringely

There’s a moment in everyone’s existence, toward the tail end of midlife, where we look around in utter confusion. Many people mistake it for the first day of old age and mental decrepitude, but they’re wrong. It’s the first day of wisdom -- not deep, Buddha-like knowledge that might draw in hemp-dressed groupies who frolic around while you sit and eat organic grapes, but stark common sense forged in scotch and blood.

It’s that peculiar glint we see in the eyes of youth-challenged citizens as they look at us when we do something “now” and “happening.” We interpret the glint as befuddlement, but as it turns out, we’re the dummies. They know full well what’s going on, but they can't believe we're stupid enough to do whatever it is we’re doing. My dad gave me that look many times, like when he spied me rolling up the sleeves of my linen sport jacket in 1984 or caught me listening to Depeche Mode. Now I flashed the same peep when my little sister told me she wanted to buy a smart fridge.

I’m starting to think honesty is overrated. Strike that -- I know it’s overrated. The right lie at the right time delivered in the right way can get you out of nearly any jam imaginable -- say, if Pammy calls you out of the blue, even as you were starting to forget the nightmares.

But call she did, and with that unique blend of guilt- and terror-inducing rhetoric that's haunted my dreams for decades, she hinted that she may be able to forgive my many and vaguely defined capital crimes. She then lightly suggested, pointedly prodded, outright ordered me to begin again the Wooing Process. I tried to lie my way out of it, but it came out sounding like Robert Durst on horse tranquilizers. If only I worked for the Chinese government.

Today, I was set to write about the FCC’s recent posting of its Net neutrality laws/guidelines/timid suggestions, but it occurred to me I'd have to download and read all 400 pages of the decision -- probably remember some of it too. That’s a lot to ask of me on a Monday. Besides, I won’t much care anyway until we see the tattered, smoking, blood-stained, bullet-riddled revision that limps out of the first few courtroom battles against Verizon’s radioactive, demon-studded legal team. Instead, I’ll write about how much I hate the Apple Watch because there’s surprisingly little on that -- I mean, surprisingly little.

I recently received an email from a fresh-faced Ivy League grad asking me to mentor him in the wild, wooly world of tech startups. I decided to take him up on it because he offered to meet me at MacDougal’s and buy the scotch. Also, I wanted the mentoring tax credit (which I later learned was entirely a figment of my bartender’s imagination).

When I arrived at the appointed time, I had to step over a tattered homeless man huddled on the front stoop. He made a grab for my pant leg, but I easily kicked myself free, as the prospect of free booze always strengthens my extremities. But aside from the usual assortment of 2 p.m. barflies -- a couple of successful tech VCs, Lenovo’s PR chief, and Evan Spiegel’s wet nurse -- the place was empty. I went back outside and tripped over the homeless guy again. I was about to threaten him with Rep. Don Young’s (R-Alaska) gray wolves, but he managed to weakly blurt out, “It’s me, Mr. Cringely. I’m the one you’re here to meet.”

I’ve nearly given up on a Pulitzer and not because I write like an eighth grader. It’s because you people aren’t giving me anything. I’ve sent uncounted emails to the Pulitzer committee, and they go a lot like this:

Subject: The Great American Story Dear Pulitzer Committee: This time I have it! Please contact me for further details! -- RXC p.s. No, really! This is it!!

Re: Subject: The Great American StoryDear Robert:Please stop sending us these emails. You write like an eighth grader.-- The Pulitzer Committeep.s. You really do write like an eighth grader because only eighth graders use double exclamation points, and only when tweeting. Grow up and stop drinking.

I’ve spent hours loitering on the Columbia University campus wearing tweed and a press badge and throwing deep, meaningful glances at anyone who even looked like faculty while scribbling in a notebook labeled “My big story” -- nothing. I track Pulitzer judges to their offices and show them drafts of my prose, and they all say, “I don’t think this qualifies as compelling news.” Also: “This definitely isn’t compelling news.” Finally: “Get out or I’ll call security.”

Once again, I’m in jail and it’s all InfoWorld's fault. If only my editor had forked for my freight to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2015, I could've avoided the four-layover, 44-hour itinerary, capped off by a brawl at baggage claim.

But it’s Spain, so not only are they serving tapas and rioja in jail, they also gave me a Wi-Fi password because they feel sorry for the old hombre. And since I managed to get one full day at MWC before the local authorities woke up from their siesta and decided to act on the arrest warrant, I can let you know what’s going on. Hold on to your hats.

We are ruined. We are wax puppets spit-roasting over a campfire. We are cats about to be spayed by dogs. Net neutrality has passed, woe to the world.

I used to support dragging ISPs into Title II telecom status. I ranted and raved in favor of the move, apparently fueled by drink, ignorance, and low morals, plus a rampant lack of empathy for you, the Average Joe. Now that Net neutrality has made it past round one, I'm shocked, mortified, by the outburst of publicly minded, not-at-all-greedy grief expressed by ISP executives and their bankrolled politicians. These worthies decried the new regulations as sins against humanity that can only end with you celebrating your next birthday with the Antichrist or Travis Kalanick, depending on whose schedule is most flexible (my money is on the Antichrist).

It’s time to begin my own Kickstarter project. After all, geniuses like Elon Musk and Bill Gates have taken valuable seconds out from building backyard AI shelters to hail this time as nearly unequaled in terms of sheer opportunity. They’re right -- we’re in the midst of a digital revolution spawned by the ever-burgeoning, never-quite-here Internet of things, a world where everything will be connected to everything else and Verizon will charge all objects on the planet 80 cents per minute for spotty 4G access.